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"My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time."1 This paragraph, which opens Book Il of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, is the touchstone of the novel. The narrator-hero reminds us, as he has done throughout the novel, through its structure, its language and its tone, that he is telling his story from the perspective of middle age, of disillusionment with modern life, and of conversion to Catholicism. "I am not I," the author announces before we have read a word of the novel; yet nearly all major criticism persistently chooses to disregard these signals, primarily because the critics do not feel that Waugh has succeeded in creating a fictive voice that is distinct enough from his own in hisearlierwork. I do not intend here to defend the stylistic choices Waugh has made in the novel - obviously they are not always successful - but rather to emphasize that the structure has been better designed than is usually conceded, and that we ought, as critics, to pay the author more heed, to examine more closely his avowed artistic intentions rather than ignoring them, or worse, condemning them on the grounds that no one but a Catholic could find them meaningful.
Quite simply, Waugh's artistic aim is for us to accept Charles Ryder's story as Ryder's view of his own life, so that we can understand why he has become what he is in Prologue. Waugh has chosen to use not only first-person narrative, but a rather complex form in which there are at least two, and implicitly three simultaneous consciousnesses at work, all belonging to the same character, but each at a different stage of awareness. As the structure emphasizes, the time present of the novel is 1944, when a disillusioned, but converted Charles Ryder is forced to look back on certain events in his life. The central sections of the book contain the story of Charles Ryder from the twenties to some point several years previous to 1 944. Then, to carry the point one step further, there is a Charles Ryder who is writing the novel itself, for a reader must assume that there is a point in the author's fictional world at which the character writes...